April Hale Learns About the Human Male

4: reward and punishment

I feel like my interactions with Ryder will stop right away because we have no other reasons to talk to each other anymore.

But then I'm proven to be wrong just a few hours after the last time he talked to me.

"I think you're not ugly. Not then, not now,"

I've been thinking about his words and then repeating it inside my head for the 1012 times when suddenly the clock shows 11:20PM and the screaming match between Ryder and his current girlfriend start.

This time, I automatically put the earplugs into my ear and sing myself into my happy place, this time towards a netflix show with a bunch of kids fighting supernatural forces.

I'm recounting all the events that happened in the shows, and I'm only halfway through the first season when there's something knocking on my balcony door.

I'm shocked, because I live in the sixth floor. I contemplate to ignore it until the ghost disappear but then I glimpse Ryder's hair on the other side of the door and my heart jumps out of my ribcage. This is even more shocking than an apparition.

Firstly, because I don't think Ryder has any more interest to talk to me anymore.

Secondly because how easy it is for my next door neighbor to rob me in my sleep.

"Let me in!" he mouths.

I go back and forth about my decision, but then I can see that his cheeks have reddened because of the cold and he's slightly shivering because night wind can get really harsh. In the end, I relent despite my best interest, and open the balcony.

The first thing I see is his bare feet stepping into my room.

He's saying something, but somehow I can't hear him.

I feel like I'm losing my crucial sensory and I'm trying to figure out why. Do shock usually translate into temporary deafness? Can people in the autistic spectrum become blind when the Neurotypical around them barges into their safe space? What's actually happening here?

Ryder reaches into my face and then retrieves the earplugs from my ear. I can feel his fingers touching my skin and I back away until I reach the wall.

"I said, you almost made me die from hypothermia!" he frowns at me.

"Ah. Oh." I wish I weren't as shell-shocked as this. "Uh."

My mouth fails me.

I'm tempted to finish the vowels by saying Eh and Ih, but then decide that it's not something most normal people want to hear when they're visiting their next dorm neighbor for the first time. So I look around and then point at my thermos. "Would you like some tea?"

Ryder raises his eyebrows, and then breaks into a smile. "Is it tea... or is it tea?" he asks, waggling his eyebrows.

"Tea or tea? It's tea. And also I think you just made a mistake in your speech. You should follow the sentence with something other than tea to make it an A or B option. Maybe you were thinking 'coffee'?"

It takes Ryder a while to answer this. "I-I meant... I thought you were trying to give me something... uh, stronger than tea."

"Like coffee?"

"Like- oh, forget it. I'll take your damn tea." He goes into my thermos and then takes a sip from it. I watch in horror as my bacterias get transferred into him. I was thinking about making him a new batch of tea. "Wow. It's really tea. What is it? Chamomile?"

I nod. "It helps with... uh... anxiety."

Both of us pause as we hear a woman screaming from next door. I can hear things getting from point A to point B in alarming velocity. Lots of crashing and things breaking. I bite into my lip as my gaze falls towards Ryder's hand. He's still holding my earplug.